Science is a Sacred Cow (Bookreview)

     Standen, Anthony: Science is a Sacred Cow (1950) I got this book for Christmas, from my son, who is able to find all kinds of good things in used book shops. This is one of those good things, even though Standen's rant in the end fails to convince any but those who want some sticks to beat science with.
     Standen writes well, and makes many valid points, but overall his book doesn't satisfy. He isn't attacking science so much as scientism - the belief that Science is the final answer to everything. He does capitalise Science, which shows he knows that he is attacking an attitude towards science rather than science itself. He was a scientist himself, actually.
     But his arguments, relying as they do on shifting definitions and vague concepts, as often miss the target as hit it. The problem begins with his use of the word science or Science. Most of the time he is clearly talking about some people's attitudes (most of them, like himself, academics, by the way.) Sometimes, he is talking about science as social, political, or economic activity, or of some combination of these three. Yet he almost always fails to state explicitly what he's attacking, which is a pity, since his attacks on scientism are as valid today as they were back in 1950. Sometimes, usually when he's saying something nice, he is talking about science as a human activity. And while he writes in an easy to understand style, that doesn't mean he writes clearly. In fact the colloquialism of his style often hides the muddiness of his thought. Perhaps he thought that by being more precise he would leave "the interested layman" trailing after him wondering where on earth (or elsewhere) Standen was leading him.
     Besides, much of his specific criticism has failed as science has continued to discover new things since 1950. His critique of psychology, for example, rests on the (correct) observation that Freud, Jung et al were in fact poets, and that novelists do a much better job of what these men set out to do. Since his day, these men's psychological theories have found some use in literature departments, and among those people whose malaise is one of the imagination rather than of the nervous system. Standen also believes that psychology of the more biological kind is pointless because man has a soul. So he really rejects psychology as a science.
     Standen himself has a blind spot: he believes that science aims for Truth, and so of course he's upset when it produces merely probable truth. Thus mathematics, in which one can know (his emphasis) that one is right is the best science of all. Here and there he drops hints about God and morality which suggest that the major reason he rejects Science is that it conflicts with his beliefs in absolute moral truths. But he tends to disguise this attitude in the (correct) claim that there are questions that science can't answer, and that many of these questions are even more important than the questions science can answer. Which of course is true, and immediately raises the question about what questions are worth asking, and how to answer them. On this he makes wise comments, pointing out that science can only supply a more or less accurate description of what happens, and what is likely to happen if one chooses one or another course of action, but that the choice is an ethical question. But he fails to allow that precisely because science can predict a wide range of consequences, it is essential to any decision-making. One of the criteria for any ethical choice is that its consequences do less harm than the problem that raised the ethical issue in the first place. That is, choices based on moral judgements are only as good as the reach of those judgements. Too many are made with insufficient analysis of probable consequences, and so often lead to more harm than they are intended to prevent.
     Since scientism is a common attitude in universities and colleges, Standen has found many quotations from science texts, and these make for both hilarity and appalled fascination. He makes too few comments on the kind of science education that should be offered so that the ordinary person has enough of the scientific attitude to facts that (s)he can make sense of the rather complicated questions that must be resolved, such as climate change. Standen's type of critique has had its effects: Scientists rarely give certain answers these days. Something is happening to the weather, and the best guess is that it's caused in large part by our spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But since the mechanisms are poorly understood, and at best the models lead to only more or less probable scenarios, many people think that climate change itself is a merely probable guess about what's happening, and that nothing is actually happening after all.
     Ironically, many religionists, who believe in absolute certainty, refuse to accept the probabilities that science offers because they also believe that Science is about Truth. Which is Standen's attitude, too, so that in the end Standen is hoist by his own petard. He rejects scientism because it assumes that all sciences are equally about Truth. Yet that is not so, and it doesn't take a scientific training to have that insight. Standen grades the sciences on a descending scale, with math at the top because it provides certainty, and the social sciences at the bottom because they provide at best correlations. So he, too, wants Science rather than science - and his rant is perhaps as much the whinge of a disappointed believer as that of a coolly skeptical critic of self-aggrandising experts. But he writes with wit, so the book is pleasant reading. **