Rules and Reason: Science

The notion of ‘values’ plays an interesting role in the dubious terms of the secularism vs religion debate, mentioned in opening this discussion. On the one hand militant secularists tend to associate ‘values’ with subjectivity and religion, and hence view them with some suspicion.

The term appears most frequently in articles discussing the challenge posed to Western societies by varieties of Islamic fundamentalism. On the whole, it is the more muscular liberals who are keen on this particular political language, with its connotations of sturdy opposition to religious fanaticism.^[1151]

But which Enlightenment values are being promoted here? Brooke implies that liberalism, of a ‘muscular’ variety, is attractive to his interlocutors, and points to the importance of ‘sharp scepticism’ as an alternative preferred ‘Enlightenment value’. Suskind, reporting a conver­sation with a White House aide of the George W. Bush era, pairs ‘enlightenment principles’ with empiricism.^[1152] These invidious distinc­tions and arguments over who is more ‘enlightened’ than whom simply illustrate the problem that Foucault called ‘Enlightenment blackmail’.^[1153] The question ‘what is Enlightenment?’ raised so ‘imprudently two centuries ago’^[1154] continues to exercise philosophers and commentators alike. The blackmail inherent in invoking the Enlightenment requires one to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ it. Against what? If Foucault must sum this up in a word, it is ‘rationalism’ or ‘rationality’. This is further problem- atised, of course, by noting that various schools are for or against that, too, when they buy into this discourse.^[1155]

At least now we have three concepts that might be associated fairly reliably with this Enlightenment talk, or blackmail, if you prefer: liberalism, empiricism and rationality.

Brenner points out that philosophy of science has in the last one hundred years made a journey from questions of justification (how induction and experiment are used and criticised) to questions of discov­ery and invention (how we choose between competing theories); in short, first empiricism was problematised, then rationality was. Attention has more recently ‘focussed on rational values attendant on theory choice. This leads to a richer model of scientific rationality.’^[1156] When Kuhn (1970) went down this path fifty years ago, he pointed out that we do not choose between scientific theories according to some rules, but according to particular values.^[1157] The terms are familiar from our earlier discussion of legal formalism, and the parallels with a critical approach to law are even more striking as Brenner goes on:

[T]he criteria of choice are not rules, but values. No one of our values has primacy, and there is no order that prescribes their application. It is necessary to judge case by case.^[1158]

Rationality has value in itself, but to say so simply draws attention to the very fact that rationality is a value. Yet if it is to be operationalised as a means for choosing between theories, between preferred science and obsolete or ‘bad’ science, it requires more specificity. Brenner breaks down the rational values into particular criteria for rational choice: coherence (or consistency), precision, simplicity, completeness and fecundity (or generativity). These are the judgements of value on which scientific reason itself rests. They were not determined by some empirical process, were not discovered in nature, are not ‘evidence-based’, are not adjudicated by ‘rules’. They are values that we, the human authors of the scientific, and all the other enterprises, agree are worthwhile. How they are applied is worked out depending on the context, ‘case by case’.^[1159]

Rationality is at the same time a product of the mind (l’esprit) and a combination of words and signs; it is formulated in the context of a specific discussion.^[1160]

D.