The recent court decision sharply rejecting any legitimacy for the teaching
of creationism (now retooled as 'intelligent design') in the science
curriculum raises the question of the possible place of philosophy of
science in general education. Coincidentally, I've been plowing through
chapters of a book by Philipp Frank, MODERN SCIENCE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY,
published in 1949, and uploading selected chapters to my web site:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/frank-MSP/frank00.html
Frank was a leading figure of the Unity of Science movement associated with
the Vienna Circle, and attempted to carry on Otto Neurath's program after
his death. But as George Reisch argues in his new book _How the Cold War
Transformed Philosophy of Science_, the political dimension of the Unity of
Science movement was blunted by McCarthyism. Frank himself was concerned
with the relationship between political reaction and anti-scientific and
mystical tendencies with respect to the sciences. He saw the teaching of
philosophy, history and social relations of science as a means of educating
the general public about the nature of science and its necessary role in
the fight against authoritarian reaction. There are remarkable parallels
to our current situation, as this nation careens to its doom, dragging down
the whole world with it.
Chapter 15 is now on my web site:
Science Teaching and the Humanities
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/frank-MSP/frank15.html
Frank addresses the problem of the rift between the sciences and the
humanities, dubbed a decade later as the "two cultures" by C.P. Snow, and
the urgency of including the sciences in liberal education and vice
versa. Even though the general public tends to equate science with
technology, it shows a remarkable fascination with revolutionary scientific
theories totally apart from any practical application, evidenced for
example by the popular furor over Newton centuries ago and by the public
fuss over Einstein and relativity more recently. The correlation of
physics and philosophy makes for great public interest, but is also the
source of monstrous distortions. But people trained in physics are also
not prepared for philosophical issues: science education that just 'sticks
to the facts' does not suffice:
"This failure of the learned physicist will not stifle the public interest.
The thirst for knowledge which is not quenched by the scientists will be
assuaged by people who are ignorant in science but know how to give answers
that flatter the wishes of the majority of people. Thus the longing for
knowledge of large sections of the public will become grist for the mills
of some organized propaganda groups."
Frank cites three diverse thinkers--Whitehead, Mach, and Engels--on the
ideological vulnerability of philosophically naive scientists to what
Whitehead calls the "chance philosophies" to which they may have been
exposed. Quoting Engels:
"Natural scientists may adopt whatever attitude they please, they will
still be under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether
they want to be dominated by a bad fashionable philosophy or by a form of
theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of thought
and its achievements."
Frank finds political lessons in the education and orientation of engineers:
"Among science students, the students of engineering are those who get
traditionally the worst training in philosophic analysis. They often absorb
science, stripped of its logical structure, as a mere collection of useful
recipes. Is it only a coincidence that the students of engineering have on
the whole been more impressed by empty political slogans (like Fascism)
than the students of "pure" science? There is no doubt that general slogans
play a role in politics similar to the role that general principles play in
science. If someone is trained to understand to what degree general
principles like conservation of energy or relativity are based on
confirmable facts and how far on arbitrariness and imagination, be is more
immune to the political slogans of demagogues than a student who has been
trained only to record his immediate experience and to regard the general
laws as gifts dropped from heaven for helping him to bring some order into
his record sheet."
Philosophy has done no better. The pretext that science only addresses the
"how", not the essence or the why, licenses the mystifiers such as the
neo-Thomists. Frank's nemesis was neo-Thomism, particularly its influence
at the University of Chicago via Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Frank
also cites the political role of dialectical materialism in the USSR as a
tendency to be investigated.
Frank tackles the difficulties of specialization and integration of
philosophy into the science curriculum. I'll skip the details, but Frank
attaches great political significance to the sort of education he recommends:
"An understanding of the logical structure of science is a long step toward
the understanding of the meaning of statements in any domain outside
science proper and, indeed, toward judging truth of any kind."
A grounding in history of thought is also essential>
"The best way to help the student to understand the steps in the evolution
of human thought is to present to him in elaborate detail the chief turning
points in the evolution of science, with the emphasis not so much on the
discovery of new facts as on the evolution of new principles of change in
the symbolic structure."
The political and ideological struggles surrounding Copernicus, Newton,
Leibniz, and Descartes are given as examples. And then there is the
revolution in physics born with the 2oth century and its ensuing
mystifications.
This last turn has been dramatized by the phrases "crisis of classical
physics" or "decline of mechanistic physics" or "refutation of
materialism." If one has been trained to analyze the nature of a "turning
point in the history of science," one will be less inclined to believe
that the "crisis of classical physics" is a "crisis of rational thinking"
or even a justification of an irrational approach to science.
As we have already mentioned, it is not sufficient to approach these
turning points of human thought by logico-empirical analysis only, for the
human mind is not strong enough to carry out an exact analysis of such a
complex structure. One has to study classical physics as an extinct
organism, which grew up against immense obstacles, defeated its opponents,
and then turned out to be no longer fit for survival. With this training
one would have a clear understanding of, say, the broad analogy between
the fight of medieval philosophy against Copernicus and the fight of modem
Newtonian philosophy against Einstein.
Students who have this kind of logical and historical training will easily
see through attempts to exploit the "breakdown of Newtonian physics" and
the "defeat of materialism" in order to justify a return to ancient
"organismic science." They will be, moreover, on their guard against
attempts to exploit this "crisis of thought" in a fight against liberalism
and democracy, or, for that matter, against all progressive trends which
have been historically labelled "materialistic" or "atomistic" or
"mechanistic."
And:
Whoever has understood these historic issues correctly will attain a sound
judgment regarding the last great transition, around 1900, when
mechanistic physics had to give way to a more general approach. The
transition from the nineteenth-century to the twentieth-century physics
culminated in the relativity and quantum theories which, in turn, have led
to new philosophic slogans describing this transition as an "overthrow of
the concept of absolute time and space" and an "overthrow of physical
determinism." The student who has been through the training in
logico-empirical and historical analysis will assess the attempts that
have been made to exploit the new physical theories for the benefit of
particular religious and political ideologies. He will see through the
argument by which the "overthrow of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
deterministic physics" has been used in the fight against liberalism and
tolerance, since these creeds had grown up in a period of mechanistic and
deterministic science. He will understand that the breakdown of
mechanistic physics did not actually imply a return to organismic physics,
which was, historically, connected with the political and religious
doctrines of the Middle Ages. He will understand why twentieth-century
Fascism has gladly interpreted the "crisis of physics" as a return to
organismic physics which could provide a "scientific" support for a return
to some political ideas of feudalism.
The threat of fascism is not confined to the dusty history of the
1940s. Fascism is about to take over the Supreme Court of the United States.
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