Is Science Making Us More Ignorant?
The attempt to integrate basic cultural beliefs with the scientific outlook calls for a new interdisciplinary academic field. Such a field could contribute to the debate over public literacy in science and help motivate public support for science.
Austin Dacey
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Is science making us more ignorant? Surely, scientific knowledge is increasing. In a year, we will know more, and in richer detail, about the universe than we do now. In one sense, the scientific ignorance of laypeople increases with each increase in specialists’ knowledge, since most laypeople can’t keep abreast of advancing science. But even if everyone were scientifically informed, that would not keep us from being ignorant in the following sense. We still might be lost, in that we might not have a reasonable grasp of basic issues like these: What are we? Why are we here? How are we related to nature? Why is this world here rather than some other world or “nothing at all?” What can we know? What can we hope for? A person who could recite the periodic table and explain the difference between introns and extrons but who had nothing to say on questions like these would be out to sea intellectually.
Throughout most of human history, people have gotten a handle on such questions by way of common sense, religion, philosophy, literature and art, educational and civil institutions, and assumptions embedded in natural language itself—in short, by way of their culture. Of course, a single culture might contain many, sometimes conflicting, answers. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a cultural understanding of our basic outlook on the world and our place in it.
Today, this understanding is being unsettled. Emerging science clearly speaks to central cultural questions, but precisely what it says is unclear. This is an opportunity for a new line of inquiry, rooted in a new multidisciplinary academic field with tremendous intellectual and social significance. It could help point the way to renewed support for publicly funded basic research and decide what sort of “science literacy” matters most.
The Loss of Cultural Understanding
Consider the question of what we are. One way to approach this question is through a complex of cultural beliefs about the self; for instance, that it is a coherent, unitary entity, mostly transparent to introspection, which authors behavior by the free directives of its will. Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else? I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone does at this point....cont'd
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-11/science.html
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