Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (9 page)

1. The study of the history of science is only justified by its relevance to present and future science. Therefore, historians must understand present science in order to see how past science has shaped its development.

2. Science is "systematized positive knowledge," and "the acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities which are truly cumulative and progressive" (Sarton 1936, p. 5). Therefore, the historian should consider each historical step in terms of progressive or regressive effects.

3. Although science is embedded in culture, it is not influenced by culture to any significant degree. Thus, the historian need not worry about external context and should concentrate on the internal workings of science.

4. Science, because it is positive, cumulative, and progressive, is the most important contribution to the history of humanity. Therefore, it is the most important thing a historian can study. Doing so will help prevent wars and build bridges between peoples and cultures.

By contrast, the
externalist
concentrates on placing science within the larger cultural context of religion, politics, economics, and ideologies and considers the effect these have on the development of scientific ideas, hypotheses, theories, and laws. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn began the externalist tradition in 1962, with the publication of his
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
In this book, he introduced the concepts of scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts. Reflecting upon the internalist tradition, Kuhn concluded, "Historians of science owe the late George Sarton an immense debt for his role in establishing their profession, but the image of their specialty which he propagated continues to do much harm even though it has long since been rejected" (1977, p. 148).

Science historian Richard Olson, who switched from physics to the history of science, strikes a balance between these positions. Olson opens his 1991 book,
Science Deified and Science Defied,
with a quotation from psychologist B. F. Skinner that succinctly states the internalist position: "No theory changes what it's a theory about." Olson goes on to reject such strict internalism: "There is a serious question about whether such a statement can be interpreted in a way that could be true even if the objects of the theory were inanimate; but there is no question that it is false when it is applied to humans and other living organisms." A more balanced position, says Olson, is seeing science as both product and producer of culture: "In many ways science has merely justified the successive substitutions of more modern myths for obsolete ones as the basis for our understanding of the world. Scientific theory itself arises only out of and under the influence of its social and intellectual milieu; that is, it is a product as well as a determinant of culture" (p. 3). Such a balance is required because strict internalism is impossible but if all knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture, the externalist position is subject to itself and must then collapse. The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.

Extreme externalism (sometimes called
strong relativism)
cannot be right. Yet those of us trained by Olson's generation of historians (Olson was one of my thesis advisers) know all too well that social phenomena and cultural traditions
do
influence theories, which, in turn, determine how facts are interpreted; the facts then reinforce theories, and round and round we go until, for some reason, a paradigm shifts. Yet if culture
determines
science—if ghosts and the laws of nature exist nowhere but in people's minds— then is science no better than pseudoscience? Is there no difference between ghosts and the laws of science?

We can get out of this circle of questions by recognizing this about science: despite being influenced by culture, science can be considered cumulative and progressive when these terms are used in a precise and nonjudgmental way. Scientific progress is
the cumulative growth of a system of knowledge over time, in which useful features are retained and nonuseful features are abandoned, based on the rejection or confirmation of testable knowledge.
By this definition, science (and technology by extension) are the only cultural traditions that are progressive, not in any moralistic or hierarchical way but in an actual and definable manner. Whether it is deified or defied, science is progressive in this cumulative sense. This is what sets science apart from all other traditions, especially pseudoscience.

Resolution of the internalist-externalist problem—Pirsig's Paradox— follows from semantic precision and study of historical examples. One example will serve to illustrate the fascinating connections between science and politics. Most political theoreticians regard Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan
(1651) as one of the most important political tracts of the modern age. Most do not realize, however, how much Hobbes' politics built upon the scientific ideas of his time. Hobbes, in fact, fancied himself as the Galileo Galilei and William Harvey of the science of society. The dedicatory letter to his
De Corpore Politico
(1644) has to be one of the most immodest statements in the history of science: "Galileus . . . was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. ... The science of man's body, the most profitable part of natural science, was first discovered with admirable sagacity by our countryman, Doctor Harvey. Natural philosophy is therefore but young; but civil philosophy is yet much younger, as being no older . .. than my own
de Cive"
(1839-1845, vol. 1, pp. vii-ix).

Hobbes' introduction to scientific thinking came at the age of forty, when he happened upon a copy of Euclid's
Elements
at a friend's home and turned to a theorem he could not understand until he examined the preceding definitions and postulates. In one of those flashes of insight so important in the annals of science, Hobbes began to apply geometrical logic to social theory. Just as Euclid built a science of geometry, Hobbes would build a science of society, beginning with the first principle that the universe is composed of material matter in motion. His second principle was that all life depends on "vital motion," just as, in Hobbes' words, "the motion of the blood, perpetually circulating (as hath been shown from inany infallible signs and marks by Dr. Harvey, the first observer to it) in the veins and arteries" (1839-1845, vol. 4, p. 407). Through the senses, the brain detects the mechanical motion of objects in the environment. Since all simple ideas come from these basic sense movements, complex ideas must come from combinations of simple ideas. Thus, all thought is a type of motion in the brain called memories. As the motion fades, the memory fades.

Humans are also in motion, driven by passions—appetites (pleasure) and aversions (pain)—to maintain the vital motion of life itself. To gain pleasure and avoid pain, one needs power. In the state of nature everyone is free to exert power over others in order to gain greater pleasure. This Hobbes calls the
right of nature.
Unequal passions among individuals living in nature lead to a state of "war of all against all." In the most famous passage in political theory, Hobbes imagines life without government and the state: "In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain ... no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" ([1651] 1968, p. 76). Fortunately, Hobbes argues, humans have reason and can alter the right of nature in favor of the
law of nature,
out of which comes the social contract. The contract calls for individuals to surrender
all
rights (except self-defense) to the sovereign who, like the biblical Leviathan, is responsible only to God. Compared to a war of all against all, a sovereign presiding over the state is far superior and forms the basis for a rational society in which peace and prosperity are available on a mass scale.

I have oversimplified the steps in Hobbes' complex theory, but the point is that his reasoning was Euclidean and his system mechanical. He began with metaphysical first principles and ended with an entire social structure. Moreover, because many political theorists consider Hobbes the most influential thinker of the modern age, the connection Hobbes made between politics and science is not dead yet. Science and culture are interactive, not separate and independent, despite attempts by scientists to keep them separate. One of the founders of modern science, Isaac Newton, in the third edition (1726) of his great work, the
Principia,
claimed, "Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of properties of gravity from phenomena, and I feign no hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy" ([1729] 1962, vol. 2, p. 547). Yet Olson has demonstrated just how often Newton did feign hypotheses, "such as the conjecture that light is globular and resembles tennis balls, which is clearly presented in the first optics paper" (1991, p. 98). Moreover, says Olson, even with regard to the law of gravity—Newton's greatest achievement—he feigned hypotheses: "It is undeniable that he did speculate about the cause of gravity—not only privately, but also in print. It has even been argued very convincingly that, so far as the study of experimental natural philosophy in the eighteenth century is concerned, Newton's conjectures and hypotheses ... were more important than the antihypothetical tradition of the
Principia"
(1991, p. 99). What could be more occult and metaphysical, in fact, than the "action at a distance" gravity produces. What is gravity? It is the tendency for objects to be attracted to one another. Why are objects attracted to one another? Because of gravity. In addition to being tautological, this explanation sounds rather ghostly, which brings us to the resolution of Pirsig's Paradox.

Do ghosts exist? Do scientific laws exist? Is there no difference between ghosts and scientific laws? Of course there is, and most scientists believe in scientific laws but not ghosts. Why? Because a scientific law is
a description of a regularly repeating action that is open to rejection or confirmation.
A scientific law describes some action in nature that can be tested. The description is in the mind. The repeating action is in nature. The test confirms or rejects it as a law. The law of gravity, for example, describes the repeating attraction between objects, and it has been tested over and over against external reality, and thus it has been confirmed. Ghosts have never been successfully tested against external reality (I do not count blurry photographs with smudges on them that can be explained and replicated by lens distortions or light aberrations). The law of gravity can be considered factual, meaning that it has been confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. Ghosts can be considered nonfactual because they have never been confirmed to
any
extent. Finally, although the law of gravity did not exist before Newton, gravity did. Ghosts never exist apart from their description by believers. The difference between ghosts and scientific laws is significant and real. Pirsig's Paradox is resolved: all description is in the mind, but scientific laws describe repeating natural phenomena while pseudoscientfic claims are idiosyncratic.

Pseudoscience and Pseudohistory

Okay, so ghosts are bunk, along with most claims that fall under the heading of pseudoscience, by which I mean
claims presented so that they appear scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility.
The search for extraterrestrial life is not pseudoscience because it is plausible, even though the evidence for it thus far is nonexistent (the SETI—Search for

Extraterrestrial Intelligence—program looks for extraterrestrial radio signals). Alien abduction claims, however, are pseudoscience. Not only is physical evidence lacking but it is highly implausible that aliens are beaming thousands of people into spaceships hovering above the Earth without anyone detecting the spacecrafts or reporting the people missing.

But what about historical events? How do we know they happened since they do not repeat, either in nature or in the laboratory? As we shall see in chapters 13 and 14, there is a significant difference between history and pseudohistory. Most people would argue that history is not a science. Yet they would agree that Holocaust deniers and extreme Afrocentrists are doing something different from what historians are doing. What is that difference? In chapter 1, I emphasized that external validation through observation and testing is one of the key characteristics of science. We are told by believers in alien abductions that there is no way to test their claims because the experience was, in a way, a historical event, and we were not there to observe for ourselves. Further, the abduction experience itself is often a memory reconstructed through "regression hypnosis," which makes external validation even more difficult.

Yet historical events can be tested. External validation is possible. For example, classicist Mary Lefkowitz has written a thoughtful reply to Afrocentric claims that Western civilization, philosophy, science, art, literature, and so on came out of Africa, not Greece and Rome. Her book,
Not Out of Africa,
raised storms across America, and she was accused of being everything from racist to politically incorrect. Lefkowitz wrote her book after attending a lecture given in February 1993 at Wellesley College (where she teaches) by Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan, a noted extreme Afrocentrist. Among the outrageous statements made in the lecture was the claim that Aristotle stole the ideas that became the foundation of Western philosophy from the library of Alexandria, where Black Africans had deposited their philosophical works. During the question-and-answer session, Lefkowitz asked ben-Jochannan how this could be since the library was built after Aristotle was dead. The response was enlightening: