Reductionist science as epistemological violence
VANDANA SHIVA


The nexus between modern science and violence is obvious from the fact that eighty per cent of all scientific research is devoted to the war industry and is frankly aimed at large-scale violence. In our times, this violence is directed not only against enemy fighting forces but also against civilian populations. I argue that modern science is violent even in peaceful domains such as, for example, health care and agriculture, where the professed objective of scientific research is not violence but human welfare.

The argument is based on the premise that modern science is quintessentially reductionist. Its reductionist nature under-girds an economic structure based on exploitation, profit maximization and capital accumulation. Reductionist science is also at the root of the growing ecological crisis, because it entails a transformation of nature such that the processes, regularities and regenerative capacity of nature are destroyed.

The linkage between modern science and a profit-based economic system can be discerned in major and varied scourges such as desertification, diarrhoea, and deforestation. Since the alternative modes of knowledge which can provide solutions to these problems are oriented to social benefit rather than to personal or corporate profits, reductionist science scoffs at them as hocus-pocus. The fact, however, is that reductionist science itself often resorts to misinformation and falsehood in order to establish its monopoly on knowledge.

This monopoly results in fourfold violence - violence against the subject of knowledge, the object of knowledge, the beneficiary of knowledge, and against knowledge itself.

Here violence is inflicted on the subject socially through the sharp divide between the expert and the non-expert - a divide which converts the vast majority of non-experts into non-knowers even in those areas of life in which the responsibility of practice and action rests with them.

But even the expert is not spared: fragmentation of knowledge converts the expert into a non-knower in fields of knowledge other than his or her specialization.

The object of knowledge is violated when modern science, in a mindless effort to transform nature without a thought for the consequences, destroys the innate integrity of nature and thereby robs it of its regenerative capacity. The multidimensional ecological crisis all over the world is an eloquent testimony to the violence that reductionist science perpetrates on nature.

Contrary to the claim of modern science that people are ultimately the beneficiaries of scientific knowledge, people - particularly the poor - are its worst victims: they are deprived of their life-support systems in the reckless pillage of nature. Violence against nature recoils on man, the supposed beneficiary of all science.

In order to prove itself superior to alternative modes of knowledge and be the only legitimate mode of knowing, reductionist science resorts to suppression and falsification of facts and thus commits violence against science itself, which ought to be a search for truth. We discuss below how fraudulent this claim to truth is.

The Politics of Scientific Knowledge
The conventional model of science, technology and society locates sources of violence in politics and ethics, that is, in the application of science and technology, not in scientific knowledge itself.

The fact-value dichotomy is a creation of modern, reductionist science which, while being an epistemic response to a particular set of values, claims to be independent of values. According to the received view, modern science is the discovery of the properties of nature in accordance with a 'scientific method' which generates 'objective', 'neutral', 'universal' knowledge. This view of modern science as a description of reality as it is, unprejudiced by value, can be rejected on at least four grounds.

All knowledge, including modern scientific knowledge, is built through the use of a plurality of methodologies. As Feyerabend observes:

There is no 'scientific method'; there is no single procedure, or set of rules that underlines every piece of research and guarantees that it is 'scientific' and, therefore, trustworthy. The idea of a universal and stable method that is an unchanging measure of adequacy and even the idea of a universal and stable rationality is as unrealistic as the idea of a universal and stable measuring instrument that measures any magnitude, no matter what the circumstances. Scientists revise their standards, their procedures, their criteria of rationality as they move along and perhaps entirely replace their theories and their instruments as they move along and enter new domains of research.1

It is the central claim of this chapter that capitalist logic is inseparably and dialectically linked with the reductionist character of contemporary science which, in turn, has a set of distinctive characteristics which demarcates it from all other non-reductionist knowledge systems, Reductionism provides the assumptions and criteria which guide modern science, The basic assumptions are ontological and epistemological,

The ontological assumptions of reductionism are: (a) that a system is reducible to its parts; and (b) that all systems are made up of the same basic constituents which are discrete and atomistic; and (c) that all systems have the same basic processes which are mechanical,

The epistemological assumptions of reductionism are: (a) that knowledge of the parts of a system gives knowledge of the whole system; (6) that 'experts' and 'specialists' are the only legitimate knowledge-seekers and knowledge-justifiers.There is threefold exclusion in this methodology: (i) ontological, in that other properties are not taken note of; (ii) epistemological, in that other ways of perceiving and knowing are not recognized; and (iii) sociological, in that the non-expert is deprived of the right both of access to knowledge and of judging the claims of knowledge

All this is the stuff of politics, not science Picking one group of people (the specialists), who adopt one way of knowing the physical world (the reductionist), to find one set of properties in nature (the reductionist/mechanistic), is a political, not a scientific, act It is this act that is claimed to be the 'scientific method'. The knowledge obtained is presented as 'the laws of nature' - wholly 'objective' and altogether universal Feyerabend is therefore right in saying:

The appearance of objectivity that is attached to some value judgements comes from the fact that a particular tradition is used but not recognized. Absence of the impression of subjectivity is not proof of objectivity, but an oversight.4

Profits, Reductionism and Violence
Reductionism, however, is not an epistemological accident. It is related to the needs of a particular form of economic organization. The reductionist worldview, the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy were the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same process. Individual firms and fragmented sectors of the economy, whether privately or publicly owned, have their own efficiency needs in mind; and every firm and sector measures its efficiency by the extent to which it maximizes its gains, regardless of the fact that in the process it also maximizes the social and ecological costs of the production process The logic of this internal efficiency is provided by reductionism: only those properties of a resource system are taken into account which generate profits through exploitation and extraction; properties which stabilize ecological processes but are commercially non-exploitative are ignored and eventually destroyed.

The rationality and efficacy of the reductionist and non-reductionist knowledge systems are never evaluated cognitively The rationality of reductionist science is declared a priori superior, even though it can be argued that if reductionist science has displaced non-reductionist modes of knowledge, it has done so not through cognitive competition, but through political support from the state and the state's development policies and development programmes which provide both financial subsidies and ideological support for the appropriation of nature for profits Since the twin myths of progress (material prosperity) and superior rationality have lost their sheen in the working out of development patterns and paradigms, and have been visibly exploded by the widespread ecological crisis, the state has stepped in to transform myths into an ideology When an individual firm or sector directly confronts the larger society in its commercial appropriation of nature, people can assess the costs and benefits for themselves; they can differentiate between progress and regression, rationality and irrationality But with the mediation of the state, the citizen-as-subject becomes the object of change rather than its determinant and consequently loses the right to assess progress. If they have to bear the costs instead of reaping any benefit of 'development', it is justified as a minor sacrifice for the 'national interest'.

The link between the state and the creation of surplus value provides the power with which reductionism establishes its supremacy Institutions of learning in agriculture, medicine and forestry, for instance, selectively train people in reductionist paradigms, which are given the names respectively of 'scientific agriculture', 'scientific medicine' and 'scientific forestry', to prove the superiority of reductionist science Stripped of the power the state invests it with, such a science can be seen to be cognitively weak and ineffective in responding to problems posed by nature As a system of knowledge about nature, reductionist science is weak and inadequate; as a system of knowledge for the market, it is powerful and profitable

http://www.greenstone.org/greenstone3/nzdl;jsessionid=1EF3A151AF688057EAC95FE268048FC7?a=d&d=HASH01bf9d77e84c06577f16366d.8&c=hdl&sib=1&dt=&ec=&et=&p.a=b&p.s=ClassifierBrowse&p.sa=

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Science is for those who can't feel emotion or don't understand human relations. It's weird: like parents will handwring over this supposed massive ride in autism but there has been an entire discipline of autism governing their lives for centuries.

your thesis is confirmed by this guy i know who is studying to be a computational biologist and claims that he can't appreciate art in any aesthetic way but lauds the pure technical skill of whatever artist he has recently been exposed to on reddit

Goethestein posted:
human beings are sacks of chemicals that rub against each other and squirt out similar sacks for no apparent reason.

feels good man

Lessons posted:
i guess people shrieking about 'reductionist science' would be a massive step up from the endless weeping and moaning over 'positivism'

'shrieking', 'weeping and moaning' eh? so quick to the gendered language to dismiss the POC women from the Revolutionary ranks

Goethestein posted:
im so mad about positivism i started menstruating all over my failed driving tests

once i saw dawkins at the whole foods and i gave birth to twins right there in the gluten-free ethnic aisle

babyfinland posted:

Lessons posted:
i guess people shrieking about 'reductionist science' would be a massive step up from the endless weeping and moaning over 'positivism'

'shrieking', 'weeping and moaning' eh? so quick to the gendered language to dismiss the POC women from the Revolutionary ranks

Indeed.

bonclay posted:
so what are we replacing or supplementing reductionist science with here?

homeopathy and shamanism

shennong posted:
actually you've got it backward- organisms are homeostatic, ecosystems aren't. "balance" and "equilibrium" aren't valid ecological constructs

permaculture isn't really a scientific method or body of knowledge in any real sense of the term. the reality is that nonreductionist agricultural science has to integrate local knowledge/metis and qualitative description of things that can't actually properly be measured. ima just cite myself citing howard's an agricultural testament:
http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/post/33981/

so as far as agricultural science goes we need to take the quantitative stuff we've got, strip out the bullshit econometrics and the pretensions of ever achieving fully quantitative modelling, and start rehabilitating descriptive, qualitative science imo

Someone link to the All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace episode about ecology

cleanhands posted:

shennong posted:

actually you've got it backward- organisms are homeostatic, ecosystems aren't. "balance" and "equilibrium" aren't valid ecological constructs

permaculture isn't really a scientific method or body of knowledge in any real sense of the term. the reality is that nonreductionist agricultural science has to integrate local knowledge/metis and qualitative description of things that can't actually properly be measured. ima just cite myself citing howard's an agricultural testament:
http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/post/33981/

so as far as agricultural science goes we need to take the quantitative stuff we've got, strip out the bullshit econometrics and the pretensions of ever achieving fully quantitative modelling, and start rehabilitating descriptive, qualitative science imo

Someone link to the All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace episode about ecology