The dangerous utopia of “perfect science”: is the very idea of a “final theory” compatible with the scientific method?
For a long time there has been discussion, in the scientific and epistemological fields, about the possibility of reaching a "final theory" – or "theory of everything" – which would finally allow us to know reality in a complete and exhaustive way. Perhaps too hastily forgetting the problem of our cognitive limits, physicists like Steven Weinberg and philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars have argued with conviction that we are progressively approaching this goal. Once achieved, it would allow us once and for all to abandon the false and deviant framework of common sense and at the same time to adopt a new conceptual scheme, what in many of his works Sellars called the "scientific image of the world".
The objections are many and not at all obvious. Speaking of a "scientific image" in the singular seems very difficult, since not even scientists agree on what it should be. Upstream of the reasoning we find the illusion, cultivated by logical neo-positivism at the height of its splendor, of being able to give life to a "unified science" based on the model of physics to which not only the other natural disciplines should adapt, but also – and above all – the human and historical-social sciences, which would be backward precisely because they did not adopt the method that allowed physics to achieve the spectacular successes we all know.
Of course, such an approach does not take into account the lesson of Max Weber, who had spoken of fundamental ontological differences between the natural world on the one hand and the human and historical-social world on the other. Differences such as not to allow the adoption of a single method of explanation in the two areas. The reply usually consists in noting that the human world is also part of the natural one. The final theory mentioned above, when we have obtained it, would allow us to free ourselves, for example, of the useless notion of "mind" and to understand that in fundamental words for us such as "intention", "desire", "emotion" , "Affection" etc. it does not correspond to anything that is actually real. These would only be states that can be fully explained in purely physical terms.
However, what I would like to note in this context is a fact that is usually overlooked. Proponents of the absolute prevalence scientific image on that of common sense, and therefore the need to completely replace the second with the first, also base their arguments on considerations which belong to the category of political and social philosophy that of the philosophy of science.
There are many examples, but here I will limit myself to citing a famous debate between Wilfrid Sellars and Paul Feyerabend, which took place around the middle of the last century, and was later resumed by others. Sellars, a scientific realist, thought that the domain of the basic constituents of reality is formed by the elements that science will find necessary to postulate "in the long term". The scientific image will undoubtedly prevail but, to proceed to replace common sense, we need time, since it is the image in which human beings have encountered themselves, and its replacement implies that when the process is concluded we will become something completely different.
Paul Feyerabend, father of methodological anarchism, disagreed with a similar thesis which he judged unnecessarily complicated, and argued instead that, provided the basis for doing so is in place, the conceptual (and observational) frame of reference of common sense should be immediately replaced by a more adequate theoretical framework. In his opinion, in fact, if the attempt to replace common sense with the scientific image is successful, then human beings will be able to free themselves from the prejudices that prevent them from seeing the world as it is and from grasping the details of its structure. Not only. We will also be able to free ourselves from the prejudices that push us to differentiate ourselves from others in terms of ethics, politics, religion, etc.
Here, then, that even in the philosophy of science we find at work a sort of utopia not intended – in the Popperian sense – as a regulative ideal, but as a truly achievable goal. In this case it is not the idea of "perfect society" that acts as a pioneer, but that of "perfect science", which has reached the stage of perfection thanks to the aforementioned "final theory". I don't think the reasoning sounded plausible to an ironic and disenchanted thinker like Feyerabend was. And yet he formulated it in a precise way, letting us understand through a paradox what the weight of utopia is also in the scientific field. I conclude by noting that even in this case the idea of perfection, in addition to not taking into account our limitations, is a harbinger of enormous trouble. In fact, what could be the purpose of our life in a world that can be completely known once and for all? And how could we live without the hope of always learning something new? To quote Popper once again, a "society of ants" would emerge, and not of human beings. Fortunately, the Austrian epistemologist also stressed that the history of science is a great cemetery of theories, thereby relegating the "final theory" to the realm of unrealistic dreams.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-pericolosa-utopia-della-scienza-perfetta-lidea-stessa-di-una-teoria-finale-e-compatibile-con-il-metodo-scientifico/ on Mon, 10 May 2021 03:52:00 +0000.