This is something I have noticed and that frustrates me a great deal. Science is treated as received wisdom handed down by the authorities.
I have made great efforts to avoid that in my children's education. A hint for people in the UK - look at science GCSEs other than the usual physics, chemistry biology trio. My daughter did astronomy and it was far better as it had a lot of explanation of historical cosmology and what the evidence has been for various theories.
This would have been a lot better with a “steelman” version of the “scientism credo” rather than the exaggerated form presented. I found it pretty alienating to try to read this, even though I probably agree with the thesis on the whole.
If you want to argue something is a religion, you need to define “religion”. Often it is defined vaguely enough that anything can be called a religion. But if the word can be applied to everything it is meningless.
Translated by JS Bell of the Inequalities fame
Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years. His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some truly spectacular successes, quite a lot of knowledge that hints weakly, and a rather empty middle ground.
Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive method.
Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes looking and, yes, it is really there!
I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll build on the gyroscope example and call it Gyro-gnosis.
But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.
I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write Thintdom.
By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back, you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to well to be criticized.
It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And some of the lower level features help with understanding the higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you get thintdom.
By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I think the most promising starting point is to push back against linguist poverty. We have only one word, empiricism for, err, empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.
For a bit more background on Grothendieck's position on science, I've recently translated Grothendieck's talk on science at CERN, which was quite hard to find at some point: https://github.com/Lapin0t/grothendieck-cern/.
In my time as a biochem undergrad and grad student, I had to memorize and regurgitate the Krebs cycle no less than four times. None of those romps through it addressed the question of how TF did those scientists figure it out.
There's the science of Karl Popper, where no statement can be considered scientific unless it is possible to devise an experiment to disprove it. And there's the science of education, where we memorize and regurgitate stuff.
Those two are stunningly different from each other. Yet, it's not possible to get to the mysterious work of actually doing Popper-level science without memorizing what went before. The critiques of this paper still ring true half a century on. I wish more students of science from primary school on up would pester their teachers and each other with the question, "how do you know?"
I like the word scientism, but what he describes is really academic scholasticism. Maybe we should call it neo-scholasticism. The practioners of this profession is the same old "learned doctors." They make their living by selling (in this field "selling" means "teaching") the knowledge they have hidden in a proprietary language. Academic education is a ponzi scheme. You are forced to pass formal exams in order to gain the right to enter the next level of exams. When there are no more exams to take you are given a piece of paper and thrown out of the system. This is an exaggerated and pessimistic view but it has some truth in it.
I have been really hoping that these myths would not be as prevalent today as they are.
Personally, I've been greatly influenced by Feynman's great autobiography Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman![1].
In it, the Noble-prize winning Scientist conveys a worldview that has none of the scientism derided by Grothendieck in this essay. It is a vaccine against scientism, if you may - and a triumph of curiosity, common and uncommon sense.
Feynman also coined[2] the description of physics (which I use to describe mathematics as well), that annihilates the high-priest narrative of "reason" as the driving force:
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it
In the end, we do things because they feel good and because they feel right.
Mathematics more so than anything else; we are guided by a sense of beauty and what's interesting. It's an art of story-telling and surprise.
Much of science is motivated by emotion and little else: the curiosity to untangle the patterns of how things work, drive to be the first to solve the mystery, the mission of doing the right thing.
Without those, science doesn't science. Feynman gave one straightforward example: the military wasn't telling some of the lower-ranking researchers of the Manhattan project what they were working on, and why. They were lagging behind. Once they were told, at Feynman's insistence, that they were a part of a project to build a bomb that would end the war, they exceeded all expectations.
Because with that, their work gained a purpose, and gave hope.
In the end, how we feel about things is everything. Scientists are just those people who feel good when they find out how things work, just like engineers are those people who feel good when they make things work (or make things that work).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
[2] Disputed, but it's definitely in his character: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
This is a pretty confused piece of writing and totally falls apart on myth 4:
> Only the opinion of the experts in a given field has any bearing on any question in this field.
This has nothing to do with science and is really a point about the division of labor/economics.
The rejection of experts has been a hallmark of scientific and mathematical thinking since ancient times, most famously in Socrates. But the thread continues throughout all of human history.
I like Grothendieck's work a lot, and I know he had unconventional politics. But this reads like one of the many Marx-influenced attempts from that period to discredit the idea of truth.
Maybe the 70s were different, I confess I'm not that old. But in my experience you would be hard pressed to find a person, scientists, technologist or nah that agrees totally with any of the myths presented, so eh.
I bet it's fun to pretend like your the little guy fighting against dogma, but try to remember we still live in a world where the majority of people still worship some flavor of desert cult leader from 2000 to 200 years ago. So crying about science being bad too just feels a bit tone deaf
A more measured take on the relationship between science and religion: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/29763
Science can only prove what can be observed, because the scientific method relies on observation.
There are some things that we can make very accurate guesses on: IE, evolution. No one observed evolution over millennia, yet there is an abundance of observable evidence that makes the theory of evolution generally accepted as fact.
But there are things that we can not observe, and can only make educated guesses at. Today that's multiverse theory. In the past, it was the theory of relativity.
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My point is that to call science a religion (Scienceism) is to fundamentally misunderstand the limits of observation, and the purpose of religion. Science will never tell us why we're here, is there a god, does it love us, is the human soul immortal, do all dogs go to heaven, ect. At best it can only explain religion from anthropomorphic principles.
And that's okay.
The problem comes when scientists think that observed fact (or generally accepted fact) negates religion, or when religious people think science is a replacement for religion.
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Can you BELIEVE people once thought the beginning of everything was 6,000 years ago? Thank goodness every sane person is unequivocally certain that it was actually 14 billion years now!
I've been working on translating and summarizing some of Grothendieck's esoteric writing from his later years. It's...pretty bananas. But some fascinating stuff--clearly brilliant and a little crazy.
https://github.com/superb-owl/grothendieck