The Epistemology of Dogmatic Sciencey Skepticism

"I am the hierophant of epistemic autocracy! Behold my labcoat and collective groupmind scientifically melded to all other scientists past-present-and future!"

Or, The Enlightenment rationalist laid bare

By: Jay

An interesting discussion/debate recently transpired.  A friend who is a scientific “skeptic” discussed his dubious demeanor in terms of there being advanced secret technology for two reasons.  First, such ”conspiracies” are doubtful because they are “theories” and come from persons who want to promote a certain worldview (namely a conspiratorial one).  Evidence is gathered, so the theory goes, that is interpreted in a certain fashion to back up the said theory.  Pause for a minute: doesn’t that sound a lot like the modus operandi of those who utilize the “scientific method” to “prove” a certain theory?  Why, yes it does!

Second, he made the argument that the process of scientific advancement is such that whatever advances occur, occur because “someone contemporary to said person would eventually discover the same thing.”  Scientific advancement and discovery happens (so this narrative goes) in a community of objective, non-biased “scientists” committed to the use of “reason” and the building up of human knowledge and progress.  Communities of scientists don white lab coats and thereupon, like Mormon underwear, become sacramentally endued with a sciencey force field that shields them from bias, groupthink, deception, forgery and other nasty human tendencies.

Let’s examine both of these arguments philosophically.  The business of philosophy is the questioning of assumptions and presuppositions, and all the sons of the Enlightenment gloat to no end about their forebears who exalted “reason” above and all “revelation.”  The operant assumption at work here is that there is a universally shared international discourse of egalitarian scientific rationale that men are nobly committed to.  The warrior souls have long battled religionists, only to wrest control of the university and the social arena from “God talk” and letting “science” have the free reign.  These enlightened ones are the true Promethean heroes who distilled the superstition of the middle ages and brought about the dawning of the new age of evolutionary progress into computers, cellphones and the Xbox.  Do you notice that this is starting to look like a religious mythology?  There is a narrative developing, you see, that encompasses past, present and future, and the fittest (namely, those who have sufficiently mastered this reductionist quantification of all reality) press on to inherit the future.

“But wait!” comes the cry from the army of lab coats, “you now reveal yourself as a Luddite!  Nietzscheanpostmodernisthorkheimeradornoist!  You are refuted by the very computer you type on!  Unenlightened fool! You’re no philosophe, you’re a philo-oaf!”  I say no such thing.  I reject the mythology of the Enlightenment just as much as what I believe to be the false mythology of the postmodernists, Marxists and existentialists. I still hold to the rationality of religious revelation and tradition, but that is another argument.  For now, we are examining whether it is “rational” to take our doubting to a deeper degree than the Enlightenment thinker above did.  He doubted his religious views of youth and so adopted what he saw as a freeing, “scientific” worldview.  This then inducted him (so he would think) into the glorious association of the communion of saints of “science” and lab-coated genii.  But wait–the foundation of all this is the “scientific method.”  This great building block of all modernity is now what grounds our many theories upon a certain and firm basis – trial and error, which then confirms our theories, or conversely falsifies them.  Read more of this post