In an article that appeared in last Sunday’s Corriere della Sera, Angelo Panebianco wrote about possible examples of dogmatism in science. I basically agree with him and would like to highlight just one aspect of the question.
In short, Panebianco says that science is by definition antidogmatic because it consciously proceeds by trial and error, and because (in agreement, I would add, with Charles Sanders Peirce, who inspired Karl Popper) its implied principle is that of “fallibilism,” which means science is always ready to correct its own errors. It becomes dogmatic in its disastrous journalistic simplifications, which transform what had been a cautious research hypothesis into a miraculous discovery and firm truth. But it also risks becoming dogma when it accepts one inevitable criterion: that the culture of an age is dominated by a “paradigm,” such as that not only of Darwin or Einstein, but also of Copernicus, to which every scientist adheres so as to eradicate the follies that move outside it, including those of madmen who still claim the Sun revolves around the Earth. How do we reconcile this with the fact that innovation occurs at the precise moment when some doubt is cast on the dominant paradigm? Isn’t science acting dogmatically when it holds rigidly to a certain paradigm, perhaps to defend acquired positions of power, dismissing those who doubt the paradigm as madmen or heretics?
The question is crucial. Should paradigms always be defended or always contested? A culture, by which I mean a system of knowledge, opinions, beliefs, customs, and the historical legacy shared by a particular human group, is not just an accumulation of facts but also the result of their filtration. Culture can also throw away what is not useful or necessary. The story of culture and civilization consists of tons of information that has become buried. What is true of culture is also true of our individual lives. Borges, in his story “Funes the Memorious,” describes a character who remembers everything—every leaf he has seen on every tree, every word he has heard throughout his life, every gust of wind he has felt, every flavor he has tasted, every phrase he has read. And yet, because of this, Funes is a complete idiot, a man blocked by his inability to select and discard. Our unconscious works because it eliminates. Then, if some snag arises, we go to the psychoanalyst to recover the little that was useful to us and which we have mistakenly discarded. But all the rest has fortunately been eliminated, and our mind is the precise product of the continuity of this selective memory. If we had the mind of Funes, we would be people with no mind.
What culture and its body of paradigms does is therefore the result of a shared encyclopedia, comprising not only what has been conserved but also, so to speak, the taboo on that which is eliminated. On the basis of this shared encyclopedia there is then discussion. But for a discussion to be comprehensible to everyone, it needs to start from existing paradigms, if only to demonstrate that these paradigms no longer hold. Copernicus’s discourse would have remained incomprehensible without his negation of Ptolemy’s paradigm, which formed the background.
The Internet is like Funes. As a totality of content available in a disordered, unfiltered, unorganized manner, it enables anyone to construct their own encyclopedia, or rather their own free system of beliefs, ideas, and values, which may contain, as happens inside the heads of many human beings, the idea that water is H2O at the same time as the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth. In theory, we could therefore arrive at the existence of seven billion encyclopedias, and human society would be reduced to a fractured dialogue among seven billion people who each speak a different language that only the person speaking can understand.
Fortunately this supposition is only theoretical, but that’s because the scientific community ensures that shared languages circulate, knowing that to overturn a paradigm there has to be a paradigm to overturn. Defending paradigms certainly produces the risk of dogmatism, but it is on this contradiction that the development of knowledge is based. In order to avoid rash conclusions, I agree with what was said by the scientist quoted at the end of Panebianco’s article: “I don’t know, it’s a complex phenomenon, I need to think about it.”
2010