Pluralist Reasonableness Against Fundamentalist, Reductionist, and Relativist Unreasonableness

The point that scientific progress has non-negligibly depended for inspiration on science fiction, and fantastic literature more generally, is unquestionably true. But I think the force of the point is usually misconstrued, and usually to the cost of a sensible understanding of science.

This misconstrual is exacerbated to the point of crisis in futurological discourses, which endlessly confuse science with science fiction, as well as hyperbolic corporate-militarist press releases and scenarios with "data" for serious policy deliberation: In their mainstream corporate-militarist forms futurological discourses superficially appropriate sf conceits and imagery in order to manipulate undercritical mass assumptions and aspirations about technoscience and deploy them to sell crap products and military spending, whomping up the usual greed and insecurity. And in the superlative varieties of futurological discourse associated with the various sects of the Robot Cult (the transhumanist eugenicists, the techno-immortalists and cryonicists, the cybernetic totalists and GOFAI-deadenders and Singularitarian Robot God priesthood and penitents, the digital-utopians, the greenwashing geo-engineers and techno-fixers, the nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) these hyperbolic marketing and self-promotional discourses are amplified from fraud into outright faith-based initiatives selling not just the usual phony promises of sex appeal and get rich quick schemes and security from all threats, but outright techno-transcendence of human finitude, post-human demi-godhood via superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance.

I don't doubt that many serious scholars of Roman history were seduced into participation in its rigors by initial contact with technicolor sword and sandals epics, just as I know many serious practicing scientists who were inspired by Star Trek to begin their careers in biology or aerospace or what have you (just as my own inspiration by Star Trek had a place in motivating me to keep up my reading and teaching of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental justice critique (EJ)).

Nevertheless, the standards on the basis of which we identify serious historical scholarship or the laboratory and publishing practices of actually warranted consensus science are different from the standards on the basis of which we are moved or inspired by gladiator flicks or space operas. A lab cohort working on the nanoscale is a marvelous thing, as is an sf fandom devoted to Caprica, but they are not the same thing even if their participants overlap and the standards on the basis of which we rightly grasp and celebrate their marvelousness should reflect these differences, because they do make a difference.

This can actually be a trickier observation to grasp than it initially seems inasmuch as many paradigm-shifting scientific hypotheses have involved flashes of insight or inspiration that were not themselves scientific per se, but relied on accidents or fruitful analogies that emerged in processes better likened to the creative intelligence of poets than the creative intelligence of scientists engaged in the more routinized observational, testing, publishing practices that yield the contingent but warrantedly confidence-inspiring beliefs of consensus science.

While some scientists were inspired to scientific achievement through poetic inspiration, demonstrably many others were inspired instead through religious faith if we are to take their own accounts of these matters seriously, and no doubt plenty of others would attribute their inspirations to dreams, fevers, hallucinations, intoxications, or chemical highs, or, hell, for that matter, to the provocative nudge of a delicious meal, a rentboy's hard cock, or a particularly intense bowel movement. Are we ready to invite all these prompts to creative expressivity into the domain of scientific method, properly so-called, in consequence of these obvious facts?

Look, I am the last person to deny the role of the non-scientific to our collective and contested arrival at beliefs that are warrantable as reasonable in scientific terms, but I do not agree that such a recognition justifies a wholesale confusion of science fiction with science, or undermines the useful (I would say indispensable) distinction of the scientific as a domain of reasonable warranted belief ascription from other domains of the reasonable with which it is of course narratively and figuratively and historically and interpersonally and environmentally endlessly entangled in actual life.

It is actually important to grasp that many things that go on in labs were better described by Machiavelli than by any text on scientific method, that attention-economies, funding dynamics, reputation building, interpersonal organization in lab settings are often political through and through, that important scientific breakthroughs have often depended on flashes of inspiration and the workings of personal charisma, and so on. It is also important to recall that there is no definitive criterion on the basis of which we know when we have arrived at a sufficient accumulation of inductive weight to shift our mode of argumentation from the inductive to the deductive, just as it is important to insist that every deduction is in fact saturated with prior inductions, just as it is crucial to grasp that none of the criteria met by actually warranted scientific descriptions (coherence, falsifiability, testability, saving the phenomena, elegance, and so on) has never failed to warrant beliefs that were not subsequently replaced with better beliefs and hence that scientific warrant provides confidence but never certainty.

None of these crucial observations is meant to denigrate or disqualify science or deny its reasonableness or indispensability to human flourishing.

I will admit that I do hope they would provide useful constraints, however, on those who in the name of "championing" science would seek to invest it (and usually themselves, thereby) with inappropriate authority… Or who would reduce other modes of reasonable belief-ascription (the moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, among them) to the terms of the scientific… Or who would re-write contingent scientific beliefs in the faith-based image correspondence -- note that at the heart of both fundamentalist religiosity and faithly scientism is the fantasy of a Cosmos that has preferences in the matter of the language humans use to describe it, preferences would-be priests claim to be authoritatively qualified to speak in The Name of -- or the fraught capacitations of technique in the faith-based image of transcendence.

For me, to be reasonable is not to pretend to be scientific in every aspect of life -- nor even to pretend that all that is reasonable in science is itself reasonable in scientific terms -- because of some facile fetishization of superficial scientificity -- any more than I approve of those who would seek to reduce proper human life to the terms of aesthetic appreciation and expression out of a comparably foolish fetishization, or those ferocious moralizers who do the same with morals, or those cynics who do the same with politics. No, for me, to be reasonable means both to apply the criteria of warrant proper to each mode of reasonable belief-ascription as well as to grasp the actual mode of belief relevant to a case at hand in relation to other modes on offer. Mine is a pluralist conception of the reasonable, which is to my mind the furthest thing from the relativism fundamentalists (whether judeochrislamic, scientistic, moralistic, fascist-aesthetic, or what have you) will want to charge it with being.

I cherish proper scientific practice and its many accomplishments. And I happen to regard imperializing inflations of the scientific into other domains as a profound disrespect to its proper work and a dangerous derangement of the practices on which it actually depends to accomplish its proper work. And I regard the damage to science done by these self-appointed self-congratulatory Enlightenment champions no less devastating to reasonableness than I also so regard (as is more usual) superstitious and irrationalist and faith-based wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as competitors for reasonable warranted belief on proper scientific terms:

And that is just as true, whether these are Creationists who demand folk-poems be taught in biology classrooms, or climate-change denialists or safe-cigarette apologists who insist that any outcome sufficiently profitable to the few undermines the credibility of any claim, however warranted, that interferes with that profitability, or Robot Cultists who derange the qualified contingent consensus assertions of science into promotional and self-promotional promises of techno-transcendence.