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A review by mburnamfink
The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us About Science and Authority by Robert P. Crease
1.0
The Workshop and the World is utterly perplexing. Framed as an investigation of science denial, as exemplified by the Trump Administration (pre-COVID-19, so the blood on Trump's hands was much more remote), what the book contains is a series of ten intellectual biographies, focusing on the lives and major ideas of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Giambattista Vico, Mary Shelley, Auguste Comte, Max Weber, Kemal Ataturk, Edmund Husserl, and Hannah Arendt. If there's a point, it's lost in faulty analysis of this current moment, and a kind of willful blindness of every significant advance in science studies since 1970, construing the field as inclusively as possible without disciplinary prejudice.
The biographies vary in quality, striking a balance between the kinds of humanizing/salacious details that would keep an undergraduate interested, and a serious discussion of ideas and influences. Vico's chapter, exploring the ideas of a frustrated Humanist scholar who penned some of the first serious warnings against the then-new mechanical philosophy, is stronger than most. Conversely, the chapter on Ataturk is notably weak, wandering through a 19th century where Ataturk was either unborn or a small child, and spending almost no time exploring the deliberate use of science and technology as a state-building apparatus (with some genocide on the side, forming Turkey out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire was not clean).
Crease's overarching point, as much as there is one, is that scientific reasoning threatens to hollow out the forms of moral reasoning that give weight and meaning to human existence. Science and technology, in their power to amplify the actions of experts at the levers of power, extend out an alienating iron cage of bureaucracy. They enable a small motivated group to commit mass atrocities, murder on continental or planetary scales. I'm not sure if Crease genuinely believes this, but the overall point of this book is that science has drained something undefined and vital out of human life over the past few centuries, and a mass of anti-scientific gibberish has filled the void.
My problem with this book is twofold. First, this book is weak as a history and philosophy of science textbook. It has only the most cursory overview of the historical process by which what we call science became scientific, the break from the scholastic knowledge of the Renaissance to the birth of natural philosophy and then modern scientific specialization. The sole experimentalist on this book's list of thinkers is Galileo. The philosophy portion spends a great deal of time on mathematics and the phenomenological questions of how we can access external reality, while ignoring major work on demarcating science from non-science starting with Karl Popper's falsification criteria and moving on from there. And while the thinkers chosen are grappling seriously with science and its role in society, major contemporary criticisms of science are entirely absent, such as the post-modernist supposition that science is arbitrary semiotic games and that external reality is some kind of collective illusion, the feminist and post-colonial critiques that all knowledge is grounded in a standpoint and that scientific 'objectivity' masks a white male gaze, or the post-normal-science arguments of Funtowicz and Ravetz which posit that claims of fact on controversies cannot be separated from moral judgments.
In short, if I were to consider using this book to teach a intro seminar on what I have a PhD in, I'd have to add about 75% supplementary material to cover the fundamentals of the subject.
Second, this book is a piece of the time, a response to Donald Trump and the tide of anti-scientific nonsense washing over the globe. Crease casts this as a sole force, 'anti-science', but it's at least three separate yet commingled forces. The first is that perfectly described by Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt, a tactical opposition to specific scientific facts by tycoons who's business depending on those facts not resolving against them, such as the presence of carcinogens in cigarettes or the contribution of fossil fuels to catastrophic global warming. Merchants of doubt abuse the regular mechanisms of scientific debate to keep controversies from resolving. The second is what I'm going to call transcendental mysticism, widespread beliefs in non-scientific concepts like angels, astrology, and the afterlife, to take a few "A"s at random. Mysticism is often harmless, with perhaps the most obvious exception being those who rely on faith healing in various guises when conventional allopathic medicine could have saved their life. These first two forms of anti-scientific thought are dangerous, and should be contested where ever they appear, but they don't describe Donald Trump's attitudes towards knowledge.
Trump's sublime ignorance, his epistemological nihilism that nothing can possibly be true, is best exemplified by the Flat Earth movement. The spherical nature of the Earth has been known fact for thousands of years, since at least 600 B.C, and experiments to demonstrate its roundness are trivial to perform. Yet the Flat Earthers know that They Are Lying To You, and because They (a diffuse mass of the world's scientists, governments, parents, and especially middle school teachers) Are Lying, literally everything is a play in a game of deception. The world is a spider web of conspiracies, and Flat Earthers have done the research by watching endless hours of YouTube videos to pierce through their fantastic truth. This is the conspiracy matryoshka of QAnon; Donald Trump's unshakable belief that very soon COVID-19 will just go away, and it's only Haters bringing him bad news who are preventing that.
There's definitely a way in which decades of weaponized skepticism and magical thinking have lead us into this wilderness, but the current crisis of faith is qualitatively different. I return again and again to Ludwig Fleck, and his aphorism that "A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking." While scientists and those who live in a scientific world can have intense disagreement about which facts are true and how to verify them, we agree on the fundamental axiom that facts are valuable, that structured thinking is hard but worthwhile. The radical epistemological nihilism of this full blown conspiracy viewpoint thinks that because the wheels are spinning faster, they must be better, yet those wheels spin without any traction whatsoever. Calling it merely 'anti-science' disguises its true nature and absolute personal and public harms.
Public understanding of science work is hard, and I don't know anybody who's actually good at (and I should), but Crease's recommendations are laughably bad. He suggests public figures sign responsibility pledges, that they be barred from hypocritical use of technology based on science, that they be the subject of ridicule, that we use parables to encourage trust in science, and that we turn the power of the State against anti-science forces and prosecute them. This is prima facie absurd. Sartre put it best, writing in the midst of the Second World War, "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words." Dunking on these people may make us feel good, but it just gives them a banner to rally under.
The Workshop and the World has some interesting biographical sketches, but is so flawed in conception, thesis, analysis, and practical advice that I'm giving it the rarely awarded One Star.
The biographies vary in quality, striking a balance between the kinds of humanizing/salacious details that would keep an undergraduate interested, and a serious discussion of ideas and influences. Vico's chapter, exploring the ideas of a frustrated Humanist scholar who penned some of the first serious warnings against the then-new mechanical philosophy, is stronger than most. Conversely, the chapter on Ataturk is notably weak, wandering through a 19th century where Ataturk was either unborn or a small child, and spending almost no time exploring the deliberate use of science and technology as a state-building apparatus (with some genocide on the side, forming Turkey out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire was not clean).
Crease's overarching point, as much as there is one, is that scientific reasoning threatens to hollow out the forms of moral reasoning that give weight and meaning to human existence. Science and technology, in their power to amplify the actions of experts at the levers of power, extend out an alienating iron cage of bureaucracy. They enable a small motivated group to commit mass atrocities, murder on continental or planetary scales. I'm not sure if Crease genuinely believes this, but the overall point of this book is that science has drained something undefined and vital out of human life over the past few centuries, and a mass of anti-scientific gibberish has filled the void.
My problem with this book is twofold. First, this book is weak as a history and philosophy of science textbook. It has only the most cursory overview of the historical process by which what we call science became scientific, the break from the scholastic knowledge of the Renaissance to the birth of natural philosophy and then modern scientific specialization. The sole experimentalist on this book's list of thinkers is Galileo. The philosophy portion spends a great deal of time on mathematics and the phenomenological questions of how we can access external reality, while ignoring major work on demarcating science from non-science starting with Karl Popper's falsification criteria and moving on from there. And while the thinkers chosen are grappling seriously with science and its role in society, major contemporary criticisms of science are entirely absent, such as the post-modernist supposition that science is arbitrary semiotic games and that external reality is some kind of collective illusion, the feminist and post-colonial critiques that all knowledge is grounded in a standpoint and that scientific 'objectivity' masks a white male gaze, or the post-normal-science arguments of Funtowicz and Ravetz which posit that claims of fact on controversies cannot be separated from moral judgments.
In short, if I were to consider using this book to teach a intro seminar on what I have a PhD in, I'd have to add about 75% supplementary material to cover the fundamentals of the subject.
Second, this book is a piece of the time, a response to Donald Trump and the tide of anti-scientific nonsense washing over the globe. Crease casts this as a sole force, 'anti-science', but it's at least three separate yet commingled forces. The first is that perfectly described by Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt, a tactical opposition to specific scientific facts by tycoons who's business depending on those facts not resolving against them, such as the presence of carcinogens in cigarettes or the contribution of fossil fuels to catastrophic global warming. Merchants of doubt abuse the regular mechanisms of scientific debate to keep controversies from resolving. The second is what I'm going to call transcendental mysticism, widespread beliefs in non-scientific concepts like angels, astrology, and the afterlife, to take a few "A"s at random. Mysticism is often harmless, with perhaps the most obvious exception being those who rely on faith healing in various guises when conventional allopathic medicine could have saved their life. These first two forms of anti-scientific thought are dangerous, and should be contested where ever they appear, but they don't describe Donald Trump's attitudes towards knowledge.
Trump's sublime ignorance, his epistemological nihilism that nothing can possibly be true, is best exemplified by the Flat Earth movement. The spherical nature of the Earth has been known fact for thousands of years, since at least 600 B.C, and experiments to demonstrate its roundness are trivial to perform. Yet the Flat Earthers know that They Are Lying To You, and because They (a diffuse mass of the world's scientists, governments, parents, and especially middle school teachers) Are Lying, literally everything is a play in a game of deception. The world is a spider web of conspiracies, and Flat Earthers have done the research by watching endless hours of YouTube videos to pierce through their fantastic truth. This is the conspiracy matryoshka of QAnon; Donald Trump's unshakable belief that very soon COVID-19 will just go away, and it's only Haters bringing him bad news who are preventing that.
There's definitely a way in which decades of weaponized skepticism and magical thinking have lead us into this wilderness, but the current crisis of faith is qualitatively different. I return again and again to Ludwig Fleck, and his aphorism that "A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking." While scientists and those who live in a scientific world can have intense disagreement about which facts are true and how to verify them, we agree on the fundamental axiom that facts are valuable, that structured thinking is hard but worthwhile. The radical epistemological nihilism of this full blown conspiracy viewpoint thinks that because the wheels are spinning faster, they must be better, yet those wheels spin without any traction whatsoever. Calling it merely 'anti-science' disguises its true nature and absolute personal and public harms.
Public understanding of science work is hard, and I don't know anybody who's actually good at (and I should), but Crease's recommendations are laughably bad. He suggests public figures sign responsibility pledges, that they be barred from hypocritical use of technology based on science, that they be the subject of ridicule, that we use parables to encourage trust in science, and that we turn the power of the State against anti-science forces and prosecute them. This is prima facie absurd. Sartre put it best, writing in the midst of the Second World War, "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words." Dunking on these people may make us feel good, but it just gives them a banner to rally under.
The Workshop and the World has some interesting biographical sketches, but is so flawed in conception, thesis, analysis, and practical advice that I'm giving it the rarely awarded One Star.