Blog 9: Science and H W Bush

Pinker v. Lehrer

Steven Pinker and Jonah Lehrer have differing views on the future of science. In “The Future of Science… Is Art?” Jonah Lehrer makes a case for the arts and sciences to come together so we might have an better understanding of reality. Earlier in his essay, Lehrer writes, “The more we know about reality… the more palpable its paradoxes become.” Science can be very confounding, and it would seem that Lehrer believes science cannot answer all questions we have about reality. This would make the assumption that those paradoxes cannot be resolved with further investigation. In “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” Steven Pinker writes to defend science from some of its attackers. In one part of his essay, Pinker writes, “Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science.” Science is subject to error. This conjecture and refutation within science is our way to correct that error. It is quite possible that some of these paradoxes may very well be corrected because of a hypothesis or theory is not a good representation of reality. It would seem in the face of this issue, Lehrer would rather look somewhere that is not science while Pinker wants science to continue investigating and correcting itself.

Pinker and Illustration

In order to truly understand the reality, we need to have our short-comings as man accounted for. Steven Pinker takes up the defense of science in his essay, “Science Is Not Your Enemy.” In this essay, Pinker writes, “To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity.” If we don’t have skepticism, any story is true. If there is no open debate, skeptics can’t share why a story may be false. Formal precision and empirical tests are what root us to reality instead of whatever we fancy. These are important tools in discerning fact from fiction.  Let’s remove skeptism from science and bring it into politics. In 1988, George H W Bush made has declaration at the Republican National Convention: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Imagine if someone at the time within the RNC said he didn’t believe Bush. He would be right as taxes were raised under his administration. Now it is dishonest to blame Bush for this tax increase. However if a little skeptism was applied, the idea that taxes being raised under Bush’s tenure was completely possible. If that idea was prevalent in the minds of American voters, it is quite possible that Bush would have lost to his opponent, Michael Dukakis. This is an example of how we like to go with what we like and not what is necessarily true. This is why we need something to account for our errors as man, or we may end up like disappointed republicans after Bush raised taxes.