What is science?

John Lunstroth

Is science an historical concept? A philosophical concept? An ahistorical concept having to do with laws of some kind? A sociological or anthropological concept? A political or economic concept? A concept centered on method? Does it include the social sciences and the humanities?

It seems fairly clear that only philosophers of science know what science really is; that only sociologists of science have the competence to tell us how to identify one in the street (so to speak); that historians of science can best describe its development; that political and legal thinkers can best say how to use technology and the ideology of science as aides to governance and the administration of justice; and those wanting to be scientists only have recourse to communities that self-identify as scientists, but none of which have warrant to make claims about science as such.

Science, then, is a philosophical object. It tried to absorb the light of its parent discipline, but that has been a failure. Science, as philosophy, is still a subdiscipline of philosophy, located mostly in philosophy departments. Philosophy departments are not part of science departments.

Science has at least one major fault-line. It purports to have two classes of objects: living things and non-living things. But laws about non-living things are categorically different than laws about living things. Laws about non-living things are generally necessary; but laws about living things are only usual. Various fictions have been developed to fit living things to the laws governing non-living things
As someone concerned with legal/moral/political theory, one of those fictions seems particularly preposterous; to wit, that livings are machines of some kind. That fiction is pernicious and undercuts a clear description and explanation of living things, especially individual political life (i.e., the moral order). It denies responsibility, choice, intention, rights, duties, political acts, and all the other related concepts on which social and political order is based.

As an historical matter the fiction prevails even as it allows concepts that it cannot properly incorporate, such as teleonomy, the Trojan horse of Aristotelian theory.

The subject matter of this list sometimes confuses me because I read history to have normative content. Is it fair game to question how we should think of science [as philosophy] now based on one or more historical [of philosophy] narratives? There also seems to be a much stronger emphasis on the non-life sciences, which makes sense, since the philosophy of the life sciences is much more contested. How can there be a history of something that is not well-defined? Rather, is history done to define current use of words?

As a historical matter science rejected morals and non-mechanical explanations of life. But in the legal/moral/political realm there is a tremendous need to have an orderly and authoritative theory by which policy makers can impose morality on science. The social institution of science fights this vigorously, but with the technologies of genetics and neuroscience, and the widespread unethical behavior of the pharmaceutical companies and other beneficiaries of government science funding, it makes some sense to reevaluate the basis on which science rejects morality as part of the goal to find a way forward – to both protect society from science-as-technology/ideology, and to perhaps [re-]open some philosophical vistas.

I have been looking at the problem as one of law; as one of legal theory. The historical warrant for this is in the claim science (as we know it) arose out of the efforts of lawyers to assimilate and use Roman law as the secular state precipitated from the church in the post-Gratian middle ages. See e.g., Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition 120-164, esp 151 (1983). The philosophical warrant can be found in natural law theory and its emphasis on i) self-evident facts about living things and ii) the primacy of practical reason, both of which revolve around the idea of right. See e.g., John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Right (1982); Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (2006). Natural law theory is an expression of, or assumes, a theory of biology, a theory of the life sciences. Therefore, although the concern is with observations of, and methods of discerning reliable, law-like information about nature, it is not with inanimate nature. It is concerned not with the realm of the necessary, but of the usual.

Statistics is a marker of laws about the usual, but statistics is also found in laws of the inanimate and mechanical, the necessary. Although statistics is used to describe the inanimate, it is within the context of the necessary laws related to the “visible” non-quantum world, of which there are many as evidenced by technology. The necessity bounding living things is so radically different than that bounding inanimate things that it is reasonable to conclude there is little relationship between the two types of systems of “laws of nature.” The absolutely certain things we know about living things can be summarized in a few words. It is necessary for *all* living things that they come into existence from the natural processes of other living things; during the period of their existence they are not subject to some of the laws of the inanimate such as entropy; and in time their constituent parts return to being subject only to the laws of the inanimate. At the beginning of every living thing is another living thing, and at the end of every living thing is the inanimate. Everything else about living things is in the realm of the “usual,” expressible in a bell curve. Life is a unique organizing principle, and the things that are so organized are called living things.

Since the genus of science is philosophy; since philosophy has as one of its fundamental principles that humans can reason and engage in intentional behavior (else no philosophy); since the species must have the characteristic of the genus; then a theory that purports to be science that denies human reason and intentionality must not be science.

The idea of right arises because it can be said of living things that they live better under certain circumstances. That holds true in the biochemical, the individual and the political realms. What is right is determined by the use of reason. More particularly, it is determined by practical or prudential reasons grounded in the descriptive discipline, some of which reasons are protected by social or political convention. The protected reasons define methods of determining public knowledge and its reliability.

What I am examining is whether each statement made in or as a result of the protected reasons that lead to public knowledge is a moral statement because it has as its subject living things and the usual. All statements made within and by the life sciences would be moral statements subject to the right of the higher levels of organization, the individual and the political. What is right in science must also be right in the moral/legal/political realmsmade within the realm of epistemology. Instead of epistemology having pushed the moral from the lab, in fact the lab is built from moral principles.