 Hello, and welcome back to Beyond Networks. In last lecture, we were discussing the problem that a scientist, we would like to believe that there is a reality out there that's independent of us that we study. And at the same time, we have to acknowledge that what we produce scientific knowledge is the product of a social historical process. So in a way, the knowledge we produce is also a social construct. These two points of view, they seem to contradict each other and we just started to resolve this contradiction in the form of scientific perspectivism, which is also called perspectival realism. And this is a philosophy that says you can have the cake and eat it because you can be a realist. You can be believing in an accessible reality that exists independently of the observer. And at the same time, you can acknowledge that we cannot step out of our own hits. We cannot get a purely objective, neutral and absolute, a complete view of the universe as it is. So how do we bring these two things together? We're going to talk about this and how it is actually essential to have different perspectives, especially when you have a complex problem that you work on, like we do in biology today. And we're going to start this discussion by revisiting this problem of what are these perspectives? Aren't they just personal opinions? Isn't this relativism, subjectivism? All we can have is our personal view of the world. And all those views are equally important. Ron Geary in his book, which is called Scientific Perspectivism, talks about this and I'm going to use some rather longer quotes today to sort of explain in more detail what he actually means. So the first thing Geary is saying here is that perspectives are not just opinions. In common parlance, a perspective is often just a point of view in the sense that on any topic, different people can be expected to and probably should have different points of view. And this understanding is usually harmless enough in everyday life or in political discourse. It's even important to justify and to express your own point of view, but it can be pushed to the absurd extreme to the every perspective that someone brings up is regarded as good as any other. So what do you lose here if you have this? Is any justification for scientific knowledge? Why is scientific knowledge special? Why does it claim to have some sort of access to reality? You lose this and that's not a good thing. So Geary calls this, this is not perspectivism. This is just silly relativism. That's the direct quote from the book. So this doesn't get us anywhere. We need to have sort of a compromise. And we need to examine really closely in what way is it that we can get a view of the world as it is. Geary uses the example of a statue. I'm going to use the statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Here's a picture of Hume who certainly wouldn't mind being used for this purpose. What do you do to gain a picture and understanding of this sculpture? So this beautifully illustrates that there is a reality. There is a sculpture made of rock. And it is in a certain way. So we can perceive it from different angles. For example, you may imagine that evolutionary genetics is giving you the perspective from the front and the shiny light of the enlightenment while I may be providing you rather maybe the backside of Hume. Or, you know, you look at Hume by day, you look at him by night, it's raining, the sun's shining. These are different impressions that you get and you cannot integrate them in the sense that they don't all simultaneously fit together. On the other hand, they sort of add up, they complement to give you a more general picture of the statue than you would get from looking at it from one particular angle alone. And this is in a nutshell what Perspectivism does. So if you come and you say this is Immanuel Kant, it's not Hume, then your perspective isn't valid, okay? It isn't true. So there are constraints and those are imposed by the reality that we're looking at, even though everyone may be seeing the statue in a slightly different light. This tradition of Perspectivism goes back a lot further than the sort of recent texts that we're going to look at in some detail. It actually starts probably the first real Perspectivist was Leibniz, whose universe consisted of these infinitesimally small entities called monads, and every monad had its own personal representation of the entire universe in itself, like a hologram, a really weird sort of view, and very difficult to understand from a modern point of view. Kant, on the other hand, and we've talked about him already, had this notion of the world an sich beyond the phenomena, the real world that we cannot access, we only see phenomena, okay? So he called that the world of Númena. Kant also believed that some parts of our knowledge have to be a priori, we have to bring something in before we experience anything. So for example, we have to have a notion of space and time, and Kant was arguing that we don't get those from experience, we have those already. They come out of nowhere, for some reason, and we need those. We cannot even, you know, argue without those. So these are part of our human, particularly human perspective that cannot be avoided when trying to examine the universe. But Perspectivism really gets going with Friedrich Nietzsche. And I'm going to use a bit of a longer quote here again, because it's great. Also the language is great. Nietzsche says, to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, that's typical Nietzsche, is no small discipline and preparation for the intellect for its future objectivity. So it's not just the first step towards a better, impersonal knowledge. And that's very important. The latter understood not as disinterest contemplation. This is a non-concept and an absurdity. So objectivity, as stepping out of your own head, is impossible. But rather the capacity to have once pro and contra in one's power and to shift them in and out. So you are in control of what you're interested in, what motivates you, what you want, what you want to understand. So that no one, so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and effective interpretations useful for knowledge. So he says to translate this from Nietzschean, I don't even know how this sounds in German to modern English, it is, you gain from looking at the differences between perspectives and how people interpret the facts. And this is how you learn something about that real world out there. So the very fact that you have different perspectives is not a problem, but it is exactly what makes knowledge useful. And this is going to accompany us, especially next time when I will talk about the philosophy of William Wimpsett. Another step is taken by Michael Polanyi, who noticed that what we believe is more than we can prove. And we actually know a lot more than we can say. So that type of knowledge that we can put into explicit statements is only a tiny part of what we actually know. He called that other part of knowledge, tacit knowledge. Okay, where am I going with this? Polanyi says all knowledge claims rely on personal judgments and passionate commitments. So this is how good scientists choose significant questions. Where do your questions come from? This is not an obvious sort of problem. He says this is tacit awareness. It's largely intuitive. It's not expressed explicitly. That's a problem if you want to have absolute knowledge. If you can't even express part of the knowledge that you personally have. But he says that's not a problem either. We are not trapped by our interpretive framework. This is this interpretive framework. This sort of individual way of interacting with the universe, our perspective is exactly what connects us with reality. Again, having perspectives is not a problem here. It's just a fact. And we can actually gain from this. First of all, our perspectives give us a unique connection with reality. And second, by comparing different perspectives, or at least those parts of our perspectives that we can make explicit in language, we can learn a lot about the differences which tell us something about those features of reality that are consistent across perspectives of individuals. To get back to Geary, he says, Perspectivism makes room for constructivist influences in any scientific investigation. So it accommodates them even though we remain realists about the world. The extent of such influences can be judged only on a case-by-case basis. And then far more easily in retrospect than during the ongoing process of research. So basically, what is a bias and what is not? That's an empirical sort of question to investigate and a historical question. But full objectivist realism, absolute objectivism remains completely out of reach, even as an idea. And for this reason, I will call this originally very intuitive sort of realism, naïve realism from now. We cannot achieve it, and it's not worth even thinking about it because we cannot even achieve it in principle because we are limited human beings. The inescapable, even if banal, fact is that scientific instruments and theories are human creations. That's the part of constructivism that we just can't deny in any rational way. We simply cannot transcend our human perspective, however much some may aspire to a God's eye view of the universe. And this is the central point. That's why I'm repeating it a couple of times here. Of course, it's a bit of a strawman. No one denies that doing science is a human activity. It's impossible to do that. But what needs to be shown in detail, and we're going to try this during this course, is how the actual practice of science limits the claims scientists can legitimately make about the universe. So I want to show how the perspectives of genetics, for example, are limited in many ways and blind us to very interesting questions and aspects of evolution. For which we need a different perspective that doesn't compete, but complements the perspective we already have. And for that we need to focus on the process of how we are doing science, not just science or scientific knowledge as the product of this process. There's a bunch of facts. That's not very interesting. So we're going to be doing that. We're going to look at how biologists have gained the sort of knowledge they have now, and how that limits and influences the power of their arguments. One last large quote here. Geary writes, by claiming too much authority for science, objective realists misrepresent science as a rival source of absolute truth, thus inviting the charge that science is just another religion, another thing that's important. I told you last time, science is precisely not about absolute knowledge, and it cannot and doesn't want to compete in that department. And this is what often goes wrong. And if you represent science to the public like this, you will get attacked every time that we revise the scientific fact because of new evidence. A proper understanding of the nature of scientific investigation supports the rejection of all claims to absolute truths. That's exactly the point of science. There are no absolute truths about the world out there. The proper stance I maintain is a methodological naturalism. I'll talk about what that is exactly in a second. That supports scientific investigation as indeed the best means humans have devised for understanding both the natural world and themselves as part of that world. The criticism that I raise here is not anti-science. On the contrary, I am trying to come up with a better way to define science and tell people realistically how important it really is. And that, I think, he writes, is a more secure ground on which to combat all pretenses to absolute knowledge. This is what we need to fight, including those based on religion, political theory, dogma, and politics, and in some cases science itself. Think about certain popularizers of science, no names will be named, that claim that science gives you certain knowledge and do more damage than good. Let's look at what he means by methodological naturalism. Naturalism means that you do not accept any sort of supernatural, but also not any a priori claims to knowledge of any kind. You deny, can'ts believe, that you need to have some a priori knowledge to understand the world. Every scientific knowledge, all the knowledge we gain, is in some way empirically grounded. And that leads you to a pragmatist and instrumental justification for doing science. So this has nothing to do now with talking about whether the real world exists or not. It's purely pragmatic and it says, a method is good to the extent that it tends to select hypotheses with desirable characteristics. And what may those be? Some philosophers like Philip Kitcher, they talk about the epistemic good, so what is it that you want to know? What is it that you want the scientific theory to do? This could be agreement with data, why duplicability, maybe the purposes are practical, it works. And so you favor those hypotheses that work in this way over hypotheses that lack these sort of characteristics. So we've moved away from the idea of absolute truth to a very grounded, pragmatic idea of truth at something that works in some way. I'm going to talk a lot more about that, not in the next lecture, but the one after that. Because first we need to take a little detour. But what I wanted to say in this lecture to summarize is that the truth is out there. We can be realistic scientists, it makes a lot of sense. But what part of the truth it is that we will be able to perceive not only depends on our limitations as human beings are limited experience, our biases are limited senses, but also on our motives and questions. What drives us? And that determines the problems we choose to care about, the questions we will ask. So the set of questions we're asking in science right now are not the only possible questions. Alternative perspectives are not only desirable in this sense. They are absolutely essential for a science that first of all truly represents the diversity of human interest in new points. We have a diversity of scientists that want to know different things and it's less and less represented in this sort of industrial science that we have built based on a very naive, realist traditional viewpoint. Because the science we want uses this diversity to try and grapple with the mind boggling complexity of reality and to have multiple perspectives is not only fair, more representative, more inclusive, but also better for understanding the complexity of our especially biological and social reality. Before we can go into this tricky question of what perspectival truth is, what makes science scientific knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge. We need to take a little detail in the next lecture to examine the complex structure of reality and how we can perceive that. And with that I thank you for watching today. See you again soon. When I upload the next lecture. Bye.